You don't need good grammar all the times.

Sometimes my grammar isn't the best. Sometimes it's because I'm lazy and don't feel like correcting myself, even when I know what I said or wrote is improper English. I'm an out loud thinker, so pretty often I'm working out an idea or problem as I'm saying it, and haven't had a chance to be thoughtful about it (because out loud is the time when I'm getting to be thoughtful about it). I try out different words that don't necessarily make sense in the sentence, but I figure with enough context clues, you know what I mean. And you usually do, even if you're annoyed that my sentences didn't make sense.

Thanks to AOL Instant Messenger during my formative years, my writing isn't much better. I prefer to write in fragments in this blog, because I think it's easier to "hear" my "voice" that way.

BUT, there are lots of times when good grammar and spelling are really important. None more important than political debates on social media. If someone's getting all ranty and they've spelled several words wrong, the most satisfying answer includes something like, "ya, well, at least I know the difference between your and you're." or "that's the wrong kind of there." zing.

The most important thing I want to you to take away from this is: stay in school.

Will you be my Ducky Wucky?

"Will you be my ducky wucky?" is my favorite game. Here's what you do: you sit in a big circle with one person in the middle. The person in the middle has to walk up to people and ask, "will you be my ducky wucky?" and the person asked has to reply, "no, I will not be your ducky wucky. quack. quack. quack." without smiling or laughing. If they laugh or smile, they have to switch spots with the person in the middle and start asking people. It's kind of like the game, "honey, do you love me?" but so much better. Try saying that without smiling or laughing. Really, try it right now. Did you laugh? If you didn't, let me know, it will give me a new goal for our friendship.

Some kids hate this game. I get it. It's super embarrassing. I'm kind of shy, so I usually hate games like this, which is maybe why I extra enjoy making kids at church play them.

What are your favorite campy games?

Nervous Laugh

When I get a little nervous, sometimes I get the "nervous laugh". Even though laughing is fun, this kind of laughing is NOT fun. It's the kind where you know you should stop, and you try to stop, but you just can't stop laughing. For way too long. Sometimes it happens when I'm trying to be funny but I'm a little unsure, so I'll choke out a laugh mid mildly witty comment; or sometimes it comes on in a context where laughing would be really inappropriate. 

Two times that I've gotten the nervous laugh for way too long:

1. Freshman year public speaking class in college. We were giving impromptu speeches, which means that I picked up a piece of paper with a prompt on it and had to give a few minute speech to the class. I was already a little giggly because I was sitting next to my new bff in class. It was my turn, so I got up in front of everyone and started talking. Five to ten seconds in, I started laughing. And laughing. And laughing. I tried some deep breaths. I tried looking away from everyone. I kept laughing. Finally I got it together and my professor let me try again. I made it all the way through my speech, until I got to the end, and said, "we all should live life to the full-" and at this point, I spit the world full(est) out and started laughing hysterically again and had to sit down. Good news, I speak in public for a living now. And I don't say as many stupid cliches.

2. The week before Jesse and I got married, I said something that I thought was funny. Apparently I had some nerves that I didn't know about, because I laughed for twenty minutes straight. I'm not exaggerating. It was twenty minutes. Think about laughing for that long. Think about sitting next to someone laughing that long. Jesse just sat there and periodically would ask, "what is wrong with you?" I don't even know if he laughed at my super funny joke in the first place. But I did. For TWENTY MINUTES. 

The nervous laugh is not funny... right away. But when you talk about it later, it really is. 

Sisters

Every time I talk about my sisters, I sing that Sisters song from White Christmas. If you want a song to stay in your head for weeks, this is the one for you. Or if you want to have a different and funnier song about sisters in your head, watch (and listen to) this one from SNL. It's my fav. Especially Kristen Wiig and her freaky tiny hands.

I love my sisters so much. We are best friends. Kristi's been in my life for almost 27 years and Kayti a little over 23. We've had ups and downs like families do, but we've settled on best friends for life.

Here are some of my favorite memories of my sisters:

1. Dancing to Grandma and Grandpa's '50s music on cassettes and then filming it with a giant VHS recorder and then watching it later. You could also call it early narcissism.
2. TGIF and eating Taco Bell on a blanket on the floor of the living room while watching the best TV line up: Full House, Family Matters, Boy Meets World, and Step by Step.
3. Kickball, "20 Hits" (our version of baseball- we just hit the ball 20 times), biting tag (a game that Kristi made up- she would try to bite me and I would run), and riding bikes.
4. Pictionary and other family games
5.  All the family vacations and getting mad at each other for being squished in the backseat of the Ford Tempo.
6. Getting to support each other through all of the milestones and important things in life.
7. Pushing our beds together on Christmas Eve and waiting for Santa to come. 
8. Spending all but one Christmas together.
9. Disneyland one zillion times.
10. Sister-cation to North Carolina.
11. The dive-y-est bar and grill, Obb's and ordering cake and wine.
12. Pizza Luce brunch.
13. Walks around Como Park in the summer.
14. When Kristi was little and couldn't say my name, so she called me "Fluffy" instead.
15. When Kayti was little and couldn't say my name, so she called me "Bocka" instead.
16. When I was in first grade and I cried at lunch because I missed my new sister Kayti.
17. Playing in the pool at Grandma and Grandpa's house.
18. All of our sister performances: the one caught on VHS when Kayti was like 5 and got nervous and itchy, the time I made Kristi and our cousin Erik learn a song and then yelled at them when they didn't perform it the way I wanted them to, and when we sang "Here I am, Lord" at church one summer and dedicated it to our mom.
19. Watching the owls in front yard in the summer when we were in elementary school. Like really watch them. We'd set our lawn chairs out in the drive way and watch the owls that lived in the palm trees across the street. Sometimes they'd snatch up a mouse or something and that would be really cool.
20. Reading all of the young adult dystopian novels and discussing them. That's not really a memory, that's just something that we do, currently, all the time.

And, one million more.

Every now and then I am struck by how blessed I am to have sisters that I really love and genuinely really like. I know that not everyone gets along with or connects with their siblings like we do. We are sadly rare. I am so thankful for these goofs.

Here are so fun pics: 

 

Time Giver

Have you ever heard of the book The 5 Love Languages? I never actually read it, but I took a quiz that told me what my "love language" was during our pre-marital counseling. In the book there are 5 love languages: words of affirmation, acts of service, quality time, physical touch, and receiving gifts.  These are the ways that we show the people we love that we love them. The idea is that we do not give love in the same ways and we do not wish to receive it in the same ways. The quiz we took said that my love language is quality time. Anyone who knows me isn't surprised by that. Spending time with people and supporting them by showing up to things that are important to them is a way that I show love to people that I love.

Today I'm showing myself love by not making myself write so much and getting to go to sleep!

I love you guys (well, I'm assuming I know you if you're reading this... if I don't know you, I just don't love you, YET), let's hang out soon. 💜

Sometimes I want to learn how to hunt, in case there's an apocalypse

When I think about the future, there are two scenarios I see:

1. This ultra-techy world that I don't understand (for more thoughts)
2. The earth has been ravaged and our own technological advancement has been our demise. It looks like this in my head (this also what a google photo search looks like when you type in, "post apocalypse landscape"):

It really could go either way. And either way freaks me out a little. Except for the second one, that freaks me out more.

I'm totally dependent on modern conveniences: 

• Living in Wisconsin, I would actually freeze to death without heat.
• I don't know how to grow food.
• I don't know how to preserve it if I could grow it.
• I don't know how to hunt or butcher meat. Even typing that made me a little gaggy. 
• How do I get water? The kind without giardia?
• My medical knowledge involves knowing about how to apply band-aids and looking up things on web MD... but if the world ended, how likely is it that I'll be able to look up stuff on the internet? NOT LIKELY.

So, I need to learn some things in case of an apocalypse. Because clearly I'm unprepared. Although I did take some quiz on facebook one time that said, "how long would you survive in the wilderness?" and it said somewhere around a year. Not bad actually. 

But, I do want to live longer than that.

Thank God I'm married to a smart eagle scout that knows how to hunt and make campfires. 

I'm scared of what my future children will be able to do.

I had a good conversation with a couple of sixth graders about technology not too long ago. I told them about the kinds of things that existed when I was a kid (and how different it was when I was their age):

• The pink boom box that I wanted for my 10th birthday in the worst way. I wanted the kind with double cassettes so I could record songs. I got it! And listened to my cassette of Gangsta's Paradise that my cousin made me, several times an hour.
• Dial up internet that we got when I was in 8th or 9th grade and was too slow to use. 
• The giant Nokia phone that I got at the end of my junior year of high school that had 30 minutes per month and was a hand-me-down from my aunt (AND WE DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT TEXTING YET). 
• The 1-800 number our family had, that I used if I needed to call my family from a payphone.
• Payphones.
• Disposable cameras we bought in bulk for trips, then got developed at Costco.
• Cassettes. 
• My very first CD, Celine Dion (right after Titanic came out). "My heart will go on" was number 3 and always on repeat. 
• TV shows you had to be home to watch. Also, TGIF was the highlight of my week.

My childhood was completely different than theirs. I'm at most 18 years older than these kids, which is decent, but the kind of gap in our experience is way more like the kind of gap between me and my grandparents. That's so crazy. It's kind of surreal to think about the kind of technological developments we've seen in the last 20 years.

I think this meme sums it up. It's not that kids have so many things that I didn't have access to when I was their age, it's just that they have so much more immediate access. It's in their pocket. Our childhoods are drastically different and possibly so are the the ways we see and experience the world. I am really grateful that I have vivid and happy memories before the internet and cell phones. I feel like it's a gift to know the joy of human relationships without them. On the flip side, maybe I have more guilt every time I indulge too much in the immediate access to entertainment, information, communication, etc. that I also keep in my pocket...because I know how much more meaningful life is without it. 

Here's the thing. One day I hope to have children. If technology continues advancing at this exponential rate, what will my kids be able to do? What kind of technology will exist? What haven't we even imagined yet? How different will the world be in 20 more years? Will they even understand my childhood? Or their grandparents'? Will they have deep and meaningful relationships? Will technology provide those for them or will it be even more difficult for them to avoid the distraction and connect with each other? I'm already not that tech-savvy, will I be able to keep up? 

A Haiku

Haikus are so short. Who could write just one of them? Here are some haikus:

Writing a Haiku, part 1

Writing a haiku?

This is what you need to do:

five, seven, five...done!

Writing a Haiku, part 2

"Five, seven, five" what?

Oh, I forgot to tell you;

They are syllables.

Writing a Haiku, part 3

Five on the first line,

Seven on the second line,

and five on the last.

Marriage Tonight and Other Nights

Sitting on the couch,

we're watching HGTV-   

House Hunters is on.

(*I wasn't sure if "we're" had one syllable or two- but according to howmanysyllables.com, it's one.)

Flannel

Jesse's shirt of choice

Plaid and warm and button up

He looks good to me.

Autumn

Not just a season

but it's the name of our dog-

Autumn the dog Weiss.

In, out, in out, in repeat- our dog at nighttime

She sits by the door

She's wanting out of the house,

She wants in again.

Inspiration

Just looking at stuff

all around me, from the couch-

poetry inspired.

Joy vs. Happiness

These are not the same thing. 

I love and hate happiness. That sounds ridiculous, I know. I love being happy. I like to surround myself with fun and funny people, who often make me feel happy. I typically have a positive outlook on things. So, in those ways, I love happiness. I hate happiness because I see so many people chasing after it... and failing.

To me, happiness is just a feeling. It's a fleeting thing. It's a moment to moment kind of thing. It's right there next to all of the feelings available to us. Some people say they just want to be happy. But who can feel happy all the time? NO ONE. I know that we all know that it isn't practical, feasible, healthy, normal, etc. to feel happy all the time, but for some reason, I see more and more people stuffing their grief and struggle and trying to choose happiness instead. 

I'm not sure how you choose a feeling- mine just sort of happen. Perhaps people have a special gift and can actually choose which emotions they want to feel? I don't know how to do it without turning off all of the emotions or temporarily burying the tough ones until they come out sideways. Sideways emotions are never pretty.

Think about how weird it would be to feel happy all the time: 

You just failed your test, but keep laughing?

Your friend died, and you can't stop smiling?

Feeling so glad when your family member has health concerns.

That would be so weird. I think other emotions exist for the fullness of human life and relationships. Some things are worthy of our feelings of sadness, of fear, of anger.

I love and love joy. Joy is a bit different to me. I know this is just semantics, but to me joy is deeper. Joy is not a feeling. Joy is more like gratitude and deep gladness. You can hold it alongside heartache and it doesn't dishonor or disregard what or whom was lost. My sense of joy is tied to my faith. The promise of being loved always and forever by my creator, the promise of life, the promise of grace, the promise of God being with me through the good and the bad... all of that gives me joy.   

I don't want to be happy. I want to be joyful.  

My Favorite Hymns and WHY

I love hymns. I have most of our hymn book memorized. Or at least half of it. For a lot of the songs, I don't need to open the book, but I do anyways for hospitality sake. I remember when I was in high school, my pastor would tell us to leave our song books out, even if we knew the songs, because if anyone was new that day, they wouldn't feel weird to need using the book. Made sense to me. So, I hold the book anyways.

Sometimes people think that young adults don't like hymns. That's even not true. A lot, if not most, of my churchy friends my age also love hymns. 

Here are my top ten twelve (this is shortest list I could make) and WHY:

12. Go My Children, With My Blessing

We used to sing this as a closing hymn a lot at my church growing up. I especially like the older version of this hymn that has a verse 4 that's similar to the benediction we use most weeks.

11. I Love to Tell the Story

I have a complicated relationship with this song. I'm not always a fan of songs/hymns that presume that everyone feels the same way- like in this hymn, sometimes it's hard to love telling the story and definitely there will be people in the community that feel like they are lying as they sing these words. BUT, I also love this song, because of verse three: I love to tell the story to those who know it best, seem hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest; and when in scenes of glory, I'll sing the new, new song. I'll sing the old, old story, that I have loved so long." I feel called to tell the "story of Jesus and his love" to the people who know it best. We are all called to different things. I feel called to remind people that this love is for them, over and over and over again, because it's easy to forget. 

10. This is My Song

This is the only patriotic hymn that I like. The song acknowledges that God loves the WORLD and at the same time celebrates where we get to live, wherever that may be. 

9. Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing

I'm actually pretty sick of this song. I played it too many times. It's still on the list though because we sang it at our wedding and because of the end of the last verse: "Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love. Here's my heart, O take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above." I love that line because that's what I think every person of faith feels like- we can just feel that we are prone to walk away, so we pray that God would just seal our hearts in those moments of trust and faithfulness before we do.

8. Amazing Grace

Can you imagine 10,000 years and having no less days to sing God's praise? I can't! So, I love thinking about it anyways. Also, so many of the verses make me teary. Not even because of funerals, just because the words are so beautiful. 

7. How Great Thou Art

The words and music are beautiful and powerful. If you ever get in a room of Lutherans and hear them belt this song, you will cry and convert immediately (if you're not already a Lutheran).

6. We Are Called

I also sang this song too much, so I'm a little sick of it, but I just really love some of the words. Especially "Come, live in the light" and the last verse is my prayer for life: "Sing! Sing a new song! Sing of that great day when all will be one! God will reign and we'll walk with each other as sisters and brothers united in love!" So good. 

5. Christ Be Our Light

Look it up. You'll know why it's on this list.

4. In the Bleak Midwinter

This is my new fav. Christmas hymn. Verse one paints a picture of a cold, bleak, and desolate, and COLD place, and that's the place where Christ comes. The second verse is really beautiful: "Heaven cannot hold him, nor earth sustain. Heaven and earth will fade away when he comes to reign. In the bleak midwinter, a stable would suffice, the Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ." He's so awesome and wonderful that even HEAVEN cannot hold him, nor EARTH sustain, and then the place that Christ is born is in a barn, this insignificant and humble place. The third verse is just precious. 

3. When I Survey the Wondrous Cross

I first sang this song in our high school church choir and then I sang it as a solo at the last church I worked at. The second verse is gruesome, beautiful, and poetic: "See from his head, his hands, his feet, sorrow and love flow mingled down. Did e'er such love and sorrow meet? Or thorns compose so rich a crown?

2. Lord of All Hopefulness

We sang this song at our wedding too! It has the same tune as "Be Thou My Vision" (which is also my jam), but the words follow the different times of the day and how God is a part of all of it. We picked it for our wedding, because it was like a blessing that God would be with us through all of our life together, even the days that are just regular. 

1. Gather Us In

This is my fav hymn of all the hymns. First, I love Marty Haugen and everything he's ever composed. I love that God would gather us in, all of us- the rich, the haughty, the blind, the lame, the old, the young, the lost, the forsaken, the proud, the strong, all of us. I love the overall hopefulness that God's light is streaming into our lives right now. The last verse is my favorite: "Not in the dark of buildings confining, not in some heaven light years away- here in this place the new light is shining, now is the kingdom and now is the day." We can glimpse God's work in the world right now, it's right now, it's right here. 

I also have like a hundred other favorite hymns. Come and have a hymn sing with me any day. I will always love that.

Bonus points for anyone who counts how many times I wrote, "beautiful." I'm not sure what the points will be for, and I won't be able to tell you if you are right, because I'm not going to count them.

ALSO, look up all of these hymns! AND TELL ME YOUR FAVORITES! I'm not yelling, just excited.